AI startups innovate in cooling and IT ops

The optimization of data center cooling and IT power consumption are the two main areas that a new generation of software AI startups is addressing, Uptime Intelligence has found. Cooling and IT are attractive candidates for AI-based optimization because of the complexities involved in making them run efficiently in the data center. Together, they account for most of the energy use in a data center — so even a relatively small gain from optimization can deliver significant savings over the total life cycle of the infrastructure.

The challengers

This Update explores the capabilities of four startups: Phaidra, TycheTools, Coolgradient and QiO Technologies (see Table 1). These companies, all established in the past five years, are focused on improving cooling and / or IT energy performance using machine learning (ML) and, in some cases, deep neural networks to support their recommendations, predictions and optimizations. None of these startups use generative AI at this point, although one has plans for this technology on its roadmap.